The Genius Way You Can Press Broken Eye-Shadow and Blush Palettes Back To New

Every makeup lover has that heart-dropping moment. You reach for the expensive eye-shadow palette you just spent a good chunk of your paycheck on, it slips out of your hands, and bam! Your prized eye shadows are shattered in pieces all over your bathroom floor.

But there's hope—no need to dump it in the trash while sporting a Carrie Mathison ugly cry face just yet. You can re-press your palette back together, and it's surprisingly easy to do. All you need is rubbing alcohol, a small Tupperware container, a spoon, and a piece of fabric or paper towel. And thanks to a Reddit user named earworms, we have a step-by-step guide on how to fix your broken palette:

First, dump all of the sad, shattered pieces of your palette into the container:

Add the alcohol. This person used two capfuls for a regular-size blush. Why alcohol? According to the Reddit thread, you need a liquid to rebind the powder, and alcohol is extremely pure (so it won't change the makeup much) and has the highest evaporation rate (so it dries and the makeup can be used again quickly). Some people say vodka works well, but plain old rubbing alcohol should do the trick.

Then wait for the product to dry. This could take a couple of hours, but it's important that you monitor it, because you have to do something to it before it dries completely. For the next step, you'll need to catch it at the stage where it's mostly dry but still damp-ish. The user says that one way to make sure it's at the right dryness level is to poke your finger into it. If you can dab at it and leave an indent without a bunch of the powder mixture staying on your finger, then it's at the right consistency. Once it's at that stage, take your piece of fabric or paper towel, place it over the product, and very lightly pat it to pick up any excess alcohol:

Leave the fabric or paper towel on top of the product. Next, take a flat surface that will cover the entirety of the product (say, a book) and place it on top of the fabric. Press down gently so it all presses down back into the palette. This also helps sop up any remaining alcohol:

Re-pressing may make your broken product look pretty and new, but will it still perform like it did back in its unbroken days? Cosmetic chemist Randy Schueller says yes—and no. "Pressed powder cakes are held together by two things: oils that act as glue to hold the particles together, and the pressure that is is put on the cakes by metal rods during the manufacturing process," he explains. "You can reconstitute a broken cake of pressed powder with alcohol, but it's only a temporary, cosmetic fix. The cake will look as good as new, but it will not stand up to shock and vibration as well as a new pressed powder will. The compression step of the manufacturing process is required to prevent the cake from crumbling again." And when you put the powder on, Schueller says "the alcohol method could affect the way the product dispenses onto your face," but that "it could be better than throwing the product away." We say give it a try before you give up hope and dump the palette in the trash. If it doesn't work, well, then, we won't judge if you shed a few tears.